The denominator in your question is doing a lot of the work. You're comparing home hashrate against industrial petahash and concluding the home contribution is "negligible." On pure hashrate, that's true. But hashrate isn't the lever here. Block template construction is.
When a home miner runs their own node, builds their own template, and points hash at it (via Public Pool, OCEAN's TIDES, DATUM, whatever), they're producing a sovereign template. One that no pool operator gets to censor or reorder. That part scales nonlinearly. One home miner lifts the censorship-resistance floor in a way that 1 TH of Foundry-pointed hash never does, because Foundry decides what goes in the block, not the hasher. Stratum V2 and DATUM make this much easier to reason about now than it was two years ago.
The block-finding lottery is the dopamine layer. Fun, talked-about, occasionally life-changing. But the actual product is having millions of independent template builders in the network. That's the thing centralization pressure can't easily undo once it exists.
The denominator in your question is doing a lot of the work. You're comparing home hashrate against industrial petahash and concluding the home contribution is "negligible." On pure hashrate, that's true. But hashrate isn't the lever here. Block template construction is.
When a home miner runs their own node, builds their own template, and points hash at it (via Public Pool, OCEAN's TIDES, DATUM, whatever), they're producing a sovereign template. One that no pool operator gets to censor or reorder. That part scales nonlinearly. One home miner lifts the censorship-resistance floor in a way that 1 TH of Foundry-pointed hash never does, because Foundry decides what goes in the block, not the hasher. Stratum V2 and DATUM make this much easier to reason about now than it was two years ago.
The block-finding lottery is the dopamine layer. Fun, talked-about, occasionally life-changing. But the actual product is having millions of independent template builders in the network. That's the thing centralization pressure can't easily undo once it exists.